Hopefully this is the right thread for this. Inexperienced attempts to test a color map for the Dune mod have met with very limited success, and I was hoping for a bit of help.
I started out by replacing only colormap.dds:
This didn't seem to affect appearances very much, so I replaced colormap_water as well, then filled the terrain.bmp with 206,169,99 (desert color). Then I filled world_normal_height.bmp with a solid (126,132,255) and made trees.bmp black.
So far so good, as far as was expected. I made atlas0.dds a transparent blank. I tried setting topology.bmp to 96,96,96 but the entire map went dark, and filling atlas0 to a uniform gray (17,17,17) had no discernible effect on appearances. With default topology, it looked like this:
The colormap was much darker on land provinces, suns became grainy and planets were barely visible. On water, they had good color, but the watery reflection effect was distracting. I tried 89,89,89 for topology next, to try an all water map.
The colors were much better, but the reflections were unattractive, and zooming in took the effect from distracting to unbearable.
With water out, Obviously knowing something was done wrong but not sure of what, I tried restoring the original atlas0.dds and tried topology 96,96,96 again:
This is where it seemed a good idea to call it a night and appeal to my betters. I've tried different variations of the above processes without similar results. What things am I doing wrong?
I have a few specific questions:
- What is the best way to apply a colormap to land and get vibrant colors? Should I raise the brightness/contrast of the colormap itself, or is there some other control that determines how the map is shaded? The ideal would be to have the same vibrancy that water provides, only on land so there isn't any doubling/rippling.
- There's something about topology.bmp that I'm missing... is a homogenized Normal map the reason there isn't any land showing up when Topology is grayed-out?
- If you make the atlas textures transparent, does land become transparent in game? When I filled it in near-white, the whole map took on a milky sheen, but this was just as bad as too dark, and different shades of gray didn't look nice either.
- What does terrain.bmp actually do? Is it only for deciding terrain modifiers for provinces? It doesn't seem to affect graphics.
Any assistance would be appreciated, I'm running on trial and error here and this is my first map-modding endeavor. I really haven't a clue what I'm doing here. :blush: